Robert Feix

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Robert Feix
Egg egg - who is licking
jelly with Opekta?

Robert Feix (born May 26, 1893 in Vienna , † October 26, 1973 in Innsbruck-Igls ) was an Austrian chemist and entrepreneur who invented the gelling agent Opekta . In 1928 Feix founded the production and sales company of the same name with headquarters in Cologne. As a " half-Jew ", Feix survived his imprisonment in concentration camps because his knowledge of the development of hemostatic agents was important to the National Socialist regime.

Life

His father was Ludwig Feix († 1927). Robert Feix's mother came from the Jewish Scheinberger family from Hungary . In 1916 Feix married his first wife Maria in Bozen. The couple had two children, Robert and Maria. In 1934 he married a second time, his new wife was Ilse Hartmann. Both had three children, Gabriele, Ulrich and Hans Marius.

Feix's uncle Alexander Scheinberger died in 1924. According to Hungarian law, his sons alone were entitled to inheritance, but they were not of legal age at that time. The deceased's wife received a lifelong right to use the property. She made her nephew an authorized signatory. Feix later became managing director of the Pomosin works in Frankfurt am Main.

In the 1920s, he began to consider how pectin could also be made available to housewives. At that time, pectin was produced by Pomosin exclusively for industry. Feix had the production as a gelling agent licensed in household quantities and tried to get the license to the food manufacturer Dr. Oetker for sale. However, this refused.

Feix then founded Opekta GmbH in 1928, which sold pectin for household use as a gelling agent for jams . The success that the company achieved in the 1920s led Feix to decide to set up trading branches in Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. The first manager of the branch in Amsterdam was Otto Frank , the father of Anne Frank .

At the beginning of the 1930s, the Scheinberger brothers, who were now of legal age, demanded that Feix take back the management of the Pomosin factories and, since the latter was also involved in the factories, their participation. The court did not comply with this request in the subsequent legal dispute in 1936, but Feix lost his influence over Pomosin and Opekta due to the campaign.

After Austria was annexed to the National Socialist German Reich on March 13, 1938, Feix was arrested by the Gestapo on the same day . He was accused of foreign exchange offenses because he had transferred money from Germany to the foreign branches. After that he was arrested several times and finally brought to Dachau concentration camp . From mid-1943 Feix assistant of Sigmund Rascher , which was developed by Feix hemostatic preparation Polygal beforschte. From April 1944, Kurt Plötner continued polygal research in the Schlachters field command and finally in the Lochau satellite camp again with Feix as his assistant. He was imprisoned until April 1945 and survived because the hemostatic agent Sango-Stop developed by him was successfully used by the Wehrmacht .

After the end of the Second World War , Feix was arrested by the Allies in March 1946 because of his cooperation with Plötner . The long legal dispute between Feix and the Scheinberger brothers was concluded in 1952 with a settlement, as a result of which Feix regained all of the companies associated with Opekta, but lost its shares in the Pomosin works.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stanislav Zámečník: That was Dachau ; Frankfurt am Main 2007; P. 281 f.
  2. a b cf. Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): Der Ort des Terrors . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 2: Early camp, Dachau, Emsland camp. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52962-3 , p. 386.
  3. This information comes from the son Ulrich Feix, since documents about concentration camp deliveries or from concentration camps themselves are de facto not available because they were often destroyed in some form.